HH: This is so horrific, I don’t know even how to approach it. The Islamic state has kidnapped as many as 350 Assyrian Christians – women, children, and they’ve taken them away in the night. Meanwhile, we’re learning about Jihad Johnny. And it seems like on this side of the Atlantic, and this side of the world, the only thing the Obama administration can get upset about is Benjamin Netanyahu coming here.

MS: Yeah.

HH: What is, you know, not Valerie Jarrett, but Susan Rice said it’s damaging to the relationship that the Prime Minister, destructive was her word, her exact word. What do you think of this?

MS: No, I think it’s an extremely weird obsession. We are losing to an explicitly genocidal and apocalyptic movement that controls substantial amounts of territory, and as we discussed last week, is incredibly attractive to educated citizens in the Western world. When you were talking, you said they kidnapped all these Christians in the middle of the night. I would doubt they actually did that. You know, that’s the way the old school guys, your Nazis and fascists and communists used to do it. They were furtively, at some level, they knew, they were ashamed of their evil, and they didn’t want it to get out. These guys use evil as their calling card. They use evil in their campaign ads. They use evil in their movie promotions. And it’s very, and it’s horribly seductive to all these thousands of people who are supposed to be nominally citizens of Western nations, not just this Jihad John guy from London, but there’s Americans from Minnesota and elsewhere, there’s Canadians, Australians. There’s all kinds of people for whom the evil, the evil of ISIS, is its principle selling point.

HH: Let me ask you about this, because I asked Jeb Bush this yesterday in an interview with him. What’s the tap root? And he had dismissed Marie Harf’s joblessness claim, as we all do. It’s just absurd and silly and moronic. And I asked him about it, and he fumbled around, and he came up with sort of civilizational alienation. What do you think it is, Mark Steyn?

MS: Yeah, I think there’s a measure of truth in that. I think at the heart of the, at the heart of most modern Western societies is a big hole where young people’s sense of identity is. And some of it, you know, you saw a lot of that at the Oscars. They fill it with sexual politics, with all this LGBTQWERTY. I mean, I don’t even know what the last 17 initials. I know, I haven’t a clue what it is they’re meant to be, these evermore recherché sexual identity politics. Or they said it was climate change. They want to feel they’re saving the planet. And maybe that’s enough for some people. But for other people, it isn’t. And it’s not first-generation Muslims. It’s not second-generation Muslims. It’s the young third-generation Muslims in the Western world who have no attachment to the societies they owe their nominal allegiance to. This gives them an identity that the modern, Western, multicultural state, in its late civilizational decline, does not give them that identity.

How much is today’s nihilistic pop culture to blame for ISIS? During the cultural upheaval of 1966 and ’67, when the American left abandoned LBJ’s Great Society and turned against his efforts at fighting communism in Vietnam, the Beatles tossed away their collarless matching Pierre Cardin suits for kaftans, began following the Maharishi, sang “All You Need is Love,” and millions of middle class teenage kids in America, England and Europe aped their gestures, launching the hippie movement. Today though, if you’re an impressionable young middle class follower of contemporary “gangsta rap” music (a phrase so prevalent, I just noticed that Firefox’s spell checker no longer points it out as a typo), then Sug Knight’s alleged homicide(s) seem like small beer, when you can really play Public Enemy on the world’s stage. Why play “the knockout game,” uploading your violent clips to approving Websites such as “WorldStarHipHop,” when you can upload far worse violence to YouTube? Why bother working your way through one of Marie Harf’s dullsville jobs programs, when you can really get an exciting entry level position?

The terror group uploaded a video Thursday of men smashing statues, pulling artifacts from walls and attacking Mosul antiquities with sledgehammers and power tools. To justify their violence, ISIS classified all these representations of man and beast as idols. Some of the irreplaceable works date back to the 7th century B.C.

Lana Melman, Director of the Creative Community for Peace (CCFP), arranged an exclusive interview with Parsons and his band’s Israeli bassist, Guy Erez. The conversation, right before their Tel-Aviv performance, challenged Waters’ motives and took the BDS movement to task for “censorship.”

CCFP: Alan, you mentioned bringing people together. And as you for sure know now, there’s the cultural boycott movement which basically wants two main things: to prevent international artists like you [Alan] from coming to Israel and to prevent Israeli artists like you [Guy] from performing abroad. Do you guys see this as a form of censorship at all? And do you think it can have any particular impact on the artistic community?

Parsons: It’s totally censorship, yeah. I mean, people who follow it would be considered succumbing to censorship. But we didn’t. We said we want to do this.

CCFP: You had a lot of pressure. And not even just from activists but also from your fellow musician Roger Waters. How did it feel to be getting that pressure onto yourself and why was it important for you to not listen and to come here?

Parsons: Well, Guy would have killed me to start with.

Erez: If he doesn’t come and visit my country, we have a problem.

Parsons: No, the language of music has nothing to do with the language of politics. I don’t think… I have no aspiration towards political statements, contrary to what certain musicians do. I don’t think any of the band does, particularly.

Erez, a native Israeli who was discriminated against in the past at an undisclosed European venue, questioned Waters’ motives.

“Instead of saying don’t go here and there and play, if Roger Waters really wanted to be a peaceful person, why won’t you take a group of Israeli kids and Palestinian kids and make a camp of making music together. Use the power of music to put people together. But don’t just say ‘I’m taking a side, don’t share music with the Israeli people,” Erez said. “Why do the Israeli people or any other people have to get punished even though let’s say you disagree with their government? It’s just something I don’t understand how he even puts it together.”

Incidentally, I have a review of Alan Parsons’ new book The Art & Science of Music Recording at the PJ Lifestyle blog. If you’re into home music recording, it’s chock-a-block full of valuable tips from a man whose salad days were spent engineering for Pink Floyd and The Beatles.

“Hip-hop has done more damage to black and brown people than racism in the last 10 years,” [Rivera tells the Huffington Post]:

When you find a youngster — a Puerto Rican from the South Bronx or a black kid from Harlem who has succeeded in life other than being the one-tenth of one-tenth of one percent that make it in the music business — that’s been a success in life walking around with his pants around his ass and with visible tattoos.

He continued, taking hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons to task:

I love Russell Simmons, he’s a dear friend of mine. I admire his business acumen. At some point, those guys have to cop to the fact that by encouraging this distinctive culture that is removed from the mainstream, they have encouraged people to be so different from the mainstream that they can’t participate other than, you know, the racks in the garment center and those entry-level jobs.

“I lament it. I really do. I think that it has been very destructive culturally,” Rivera finished.

Not to mention rather outdated — the Last Poets invented the genre in the late 1960s, which was nearly a half century ago, the equivalent today of listening to 1920s crooner Rudy Vallée in 1969.

After discovering a cache of heretofore long-thought lost Bob Dylan acetate recordings from the dawn of his recording career, Jeff Gold of a Website called Record Mecca discovers Michael Crichton’s “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect” for himself. Gold writes:

I assumed this would be a big story in the Dylan collecting community, but was astounded at the overwhelming reaction from the mainstream media. Before writing about the acetates here, I spent a few months documenting and transferring the music with the help of two friends. When I finally wrote about the discovery in June, I was incredulous when the very next day it showed up on the front page of RollingStone.com. Even more surprising is that the Rolling Stone writer hadn’t reached out to me, but instead simply paraphrased my blog post. I know some of the writers there, and it would have been extremely easy for them to have contacted me. In the past, at the very least Rolling Stone would have a fact checker call to verify all the information. But in today’s instant media age, they just went with it. Everybody wants to be the first on a story.

* * * * * * *

A few weeks after the media frenzy died down, it dawned on me–I could have made this whole thing up, and nobody would have been the wiser. Of course I didn’t; the whole thing is true. But probably 100 newspapers, websites and magazines for the most part just went with a story on a blog that sounded true. It does go to show, you can’t believe everything you read on the internet–or in a newspaper. (Happily, though, you can believe everything you read here.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Wait’ll Gold discovers the kind of stuff that Rolling Stonereally just makes up, assuming nobody will be the wiser.

“Founder of German electronic pop group Tangerine Dream which provided soundtracks for Hollywood films and Grand Theft Auto computer games dies aged 70,” the London Daily Mail reports:

Edgar Froese, who founded the pioneering German electronic rock group Tangerine Dream in 1967, has died at 70.

The band said Froese died unexpectedly from the effects of a pulmonary embolism in Vienna on Tuesday.

* * * * * *

The band went on to release more than 100 albums and soundtracks over the years.

It also produced music for Hollywood hits including Tom Cruise’s ‘Risky Business’ as well as the video game ‘Grand Theft Auto V’.

The soundtrack to the 1980 film Thief, which put Michael Mann on the map as a director and served as the prototype for the iconic look and sound of Mann’s Miami Vice TV series a few years later was pretty awesome. In some ways, it was years ahead of its time, as synth rock would go on to became one of the genres of ’80s pop music, as the technology became more advanced, more user-friendly, and more affordable.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry visited Paris Friday in what was billed as a show of solidarity with the French people after terrorists attacked last week. The former Massachusetts senator brought fellow Bay Stater and singer-songwriter James Taylor to sing a slightly off-key rendition of “You’ve Got a Friend” to a Parisian audience. Watch the video below:

No. And you can’t make me. If the New Republic can write film reviews without actually watching the movie, I can snark about this without risking the video of James Taylor singing “a slightly off-key rendition of ‘You’ve Got a Friend’” being seered — seeered! — into my brain.

Picture this: Tom Wolfe is working on his next satiric novel, set in the White House. A French magazine has just had a dozen staffers murdered by Islamic terrorists. The president, who was dubbed by his critics “The World’s Biggest Celebrity” after his 2008 speech to pick up the badly needed electoral college votes of Germany, can’t be bothered to attend the enormous protest rally in Paris in memorial to the slain writers. His Francophile secretary of state can’t be bothered to attend. A week later, the 71 year old Washington lifer whose mind and haircut are trapped in his halcyon youth of Vietnam and the Beatles arrives to pay his respects.

With a folk singer in tow.

Critics would howl that Wolfe has gone senile — that this would never happen in real life. No administration is this cartoonish. Even George Bush, known for his “cowboy diplomacy” wouldn’t have brought a country & western singer armed with a Martin guitar to France.

Of course — it could have been worse. Kerry could have brought Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam, to sing “Peace Train.” Or Jimmy Page and Robert Plant to play “Stairway to Heaven” on acoustic. I wonder if they were Kerry’s first choices?

In his Third Law of Politics, historian Robert Conquest posits that “The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.” This administration, which began with handing out an iPod of Obama’s speeches to the Queen of England and a Staples-style “Reset Button” to Putin really does seem to be the living embodiment of how a conservative would satirize a far left White House, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, look on the bright side. “With this the Boomer era is officially over, making today a wonderful day,” Allahpundit writes.

Springsteen embraced the imagery, iconography, and gestures of the genre. He threw on a leather jacket, sculpted his sideburns, and posed broodingly in Corvettes and Cadillacs. Then he name-checked John Steinbeck and Flannery O’Connor, sang of American decay and inequality, and rebuffed Ronald Reagan, whose reelection campaign had the nerve to assume that “Born in the USA”—a gloomy song about a homeless Vietnam veteran dolled up with a misleadingly anthemic chorus and sold with imagery of Springsteen draped in Old Glory—was actually a statement of patriotism. Which is not to say that Sprinssteen isn’t a patriot. It’s just that he articulates progressivism’s brand of national pride: America is noble in theory, nightmarish in reality; cool around the edges, but rotten to the core.

James Wolcott, writing in Vanity Fair, once quipped that it was almost as if Springsteen was “built to rock-critic specifications.” Others, such as Fred Goodman in Mansion on theHill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, and Springsteen and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce (1997), have suggested that his career since partnering with Landau has been one long and meticulously plotted public relations exercise to present the Boss as a rock ’n’ roll holy man.

If that’s the case, it has worked: Springsteen has sold and continues to sell millions of albums, and his shtick is catnip to baby boomers. In fact, a standard component of Springsteen hagiography is the breathless recollection of that moment, long ago, when the author, young and searching for truth, first stumbled across the Boss’s magic. For David Brooks, it was February 1975, when he caught a live performance on WMMR in Philadelphia. For David Remnick, it was November 1976, from his perch on the balcony of New York City’s late Palladium. It was heady stuff, no doubt—and it forged four decades of adoration, which often gives the impression that some writers view Bruce Springsteen the same way young boys do, say, Superman.

And yet, despite the comparisons to Elvis Presley, as well as to Chuck Berry, both of whom created music that was an amalgamation of prior American styles, Springsteen’s work is strikingly inorganic. With its fist-pumping chord changes, cluttered arrangements full of guitars, runaway xylophones, and honking saxophones, layered behind his maudlin, over-emoting voice, with its affected “heartland” accent, Springsteen’s music is meticulously processed and choreographed, akin to ersatz rock show tunes conceived by a committee of rock critics and Broadway producers.

Coming of age in the pre-Beatles era in which critics began to treat rock music as Serious High Art, Presley and Chuck Berry viewed themselves as performers. A very different role than the strange working class yet cult-like figure that Bruce proffers, more so to adoring critics, than his fans, the majority of whom simply want to boogie and luxuriate in the hits and those golden memories of seedy small town New Jersey, circa 1975. And as Cole writes, Springsteen offers up endless portraits of working class losers, but little opportunity for transcendence, despite Springsteen’s own staggering achievements:

Springsteen’s songs, in fact, often overlook how dynamic this land truly is: In his telling, untouchable corporations, cruel lawmen, and lawless leaders inevitably block the working folks’ access to the American Dream. You need not turn a blind eye to America’s deficiencies to see how incomplete this picture is, as summed up by “The River,” the title track from Springsteen’s 1980 album. Its young protagonist takes his love down to the aforementioned river and impregnates her. Then comes the shotgun wedding and the union card (I got a job working construction for the Johnstown Company / But lately there ain’t been much work on the account of the economy). As Springsteen sings, Man, that was all she wrote. But isn’t the Boss’s success and fortune—he is, after all, the son of a working-class father, as his admirers never tire of pointing out—evidence against the inevitability of his own narrative?

But if Springsteen’s characters pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and made something of their lives, they’d be (a) off the dole, (b) America wouldn’t be the 3000 mile-wide hellhole that Springsteen (and Landau’s) ideology demands that it to be and (c) they’d be less likely to vote for whichever Democrat political candidate Springsteen and Landau are plumping for that year. So instead, Bruce is born to run — on a golden treadmill to nowhere. Too bad; those albums from The Wild, The Innocent through Burn in the USA before Springsteen became as, Paul Shaffer’s Don Kirshner would say, “a viable commercial product,” were pretty awesome.

The thing is, I love Creedence Clearwater Revival, but even in its original form the song Fortunate Son is a big steaming pile of hypocritical horseshit. John Fogerty wrote it after doing one-weekend-a-month Army Reserve duty designed to keep him away from Vietnam. It was the sort of deal a lot of people got, not just “Senator’s sons,” and his bandmate Doug “Cosmo” Clifford – the most underrated drummer of rock’s ascendancy – swung a similar Coast Guard gig.

Basically, whenever lefties go all moralistic, you can be pretty sure they’re being hypocritical. Because that’s just how they rock and roll.

Not to mention that the song is 45 years old, the equivalent of singing Rudy Vallee tunes from the 1920s at Woodstock, or Spanish-American War songs during World War II. But then Rolling Stone morphed into AARP Magazine so slowly, I hardly even noticed.

And while Spingsteen, who sang “Fortunate Son” at the Concert for Valor in DC on Tuesday came from hardscrabble lower-middle class postwar roots, he’s definitely in the One Percent now; as his predilection for $850,000 show horses illustrates.

And where does the aging Democrat Operative with a Shure-58 microphone stand on the actions against ISIS by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning presidential candidate he supported?

The New Zealand-based Website Stuff adds that “According to the charges laid by police, Rudd had tried to get two men killed — their names and that of the intended hitman were all suppressed by the judge.”

Rudd “entered no plea to the charges and will reappear in court in three weeks,” according to Stuff, which notes that “AC/DC has a new album, Rock or Bust, due out on December 2.” With Malcolm and now possibly Rudd on the sidelines, no word yet how that will impact the road warrior group’s tour plans.

Update (11/6/14): “AC/DC drummer Phil Rudd’s charge of attempting to procure murder has been withdrawn,” Stuff is reporting today, though the charges involving possession of methamphetamine and pot remain, along with the change of “threatening to kill,” the Website adds.

“New footage reveals how camera-woman was left stranded on bridge and killed by oncoming train in chaotic scenes ‘after being told to film on tracks without permission,’” the London Daily Mail reports, along with a frightening video taken from inside the locomotive that struck the camerawoman:

These are the shocking final moments before a 27-year-old camera assistant was killed by a freight train on the set of the biographical film ‘Midnight Rider’.

The footage, captured on a camera mounted inside the CSX locomotive, shows Sarah Jones and other crew members trying to flee from the railroad bridge they were filming at in southeast Georgia.

But while they and stars, including William Hurt and Wyatt Russell, were running for their lives, the metal bed that was being used as a prop in the movie was still lying across the track.

Seconds later, the bed was struck by the train, killing Miss Jones, who was in her first day of shooting on the film about the Allman Brothers Band singer, Gregg Allman. Six other workers were injured.

* * * * * * * * *

Others could be seen holding their hands over their ears to block out the deafening sound, while some were captured desperately clinging on to the sides of the bridge.

Three seconds on, the train smashed into the bed, which workers had not been able to move off the track in time, turning it into a ‘deadly weapon’ that ‘pushed’ Miss Jones into the vehicle.

Speaking to the program, hairstylist Joyce Gilliard, who suffered an arm injury in the crash, said those involved in the shoot had been told that if a train comes, ‘you have 60 seconds to get off the track’.

Scroll down the article for a photo of the email that a CSX representative sent the film crew denying the railroad’s permission to shoot on their property, and suggesting they contact a nearby shortline railroad instead. “Miss Gilliard, who is also suing Miller and others involved in the shooting added: ‘They wanted to get the shot, so whatever it took to get the shot is what they did,” the Daily Mail adds on the incident, which eerily echoes the death of veteran actor Vic Morrow on the set of the 1983Twilight Zone movie.

This is your official warning: make certain you are not in the process of consuming any beverage before clicking on the link below. For Halloween, Mark Steyn crosses the streams and sings Ted Nugent’s “Cat Scratch Fever,” in swingin’ Sinatra style.

On Christmas Day, 1977, the Pistols quietly organized a benefit gig for the Fire Brigade Union. This was done as surreptitiously as possible, for if the council discovered the Pistols were playing (especially on the Lord’s birthday), the venue would be closed immediately. Two shows were arranged at Ivanhoe’s club: the first was a matinee for the children, at which cake, food, presents were distributed by the band, as John Lydon later said:

”Huddersfield I remember very fondly. Two concerts, a matinee with children throwing pies at me, and later on that night, striking union members. It was heaven. There was a lot of love in the house. It was great that day, everything about it. Just wonderful.”

While drummer Paul Cook recalled:

”It was like our Christmas party really. We remember everyone being really relaxed that day, everyone was getting on really well, everyone was in such a great mood because it was a benefit for the kids of firemen who were on strike at that time, who had been on strike for a long time.”

No word yet if the Pistols took Martha Stewart’s advice and served “Spinach Ricotta Skulls (a classically punk motif) alongside a bowl of Spinach, Bacon, and Onion Dip (for ‘noshing’).” British punkers were notorious for “gobbing” — did they nosh as well?

YOUNG: The things that we don’t know, you know, we can do little things to fight climate change. And yet our army and our armed forces are the biggest CO2 providers into the world, they just…it’s amazing. And yet we are fighting what? ISIS…

HOWARD STERN: What do you think about that?

YOUNG: …al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that have with all our big machines. We’re doing more damage to the earth with our wars.

Neil has his own private P.A and a Yamaha mixer. He has a separate microphone that’s not connected to the house for each amp, and he can mix these to any level he wants. He mainly hears Deluxe, a lot of Baldwin, and very little Magnatone. Out front and on record, you can hear mostly Deluxe and Magnatone. Inside the big speaker cabinet to the audience’s right are 2 two-way Maryland Sound P.A. cabinets with 2 15s and a horn apiece. These cabinets have 2000 watts of biamped power, and gets turned excruciatingly loud. It just kills me to go out there-I just about get knocked over. And that’s what Neils hearing. This produces the feedback, and if we didn’t have that on, the sound wouldn’t be the same.

If the situation is so dire that it’s necessary to fight the weather rather than Islamofascist headchoppers, doesn’t Neil need to set the pace, retire from touring and shrink his own carbon footprint down to the smallest number possible? Perhaps order his record company to voluntarily stop printing his CDs, and withdrawing his mp3s from Amazon.com and iTunes? I would be more inclined to believe global warming is a crisis when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves, to coin an Insta-phrase.

Besides, didn’t we all see this movie before, a decade ago? “It’s a peculiar thing that as the threat of global terrorism reaches a crescendo, so apparently does the threat of global warming — at least that’s what some would have us believe…”

Nowadays, the term “The Streisand Effect” is a popular Internet meme to describe the blowback that occurs when a person with an enormous – and often self-destructive – ego uses his or her power vindictively. (You can read about in Wikipedia, and then read how they’ve suffered from their own Streisand Effect.) In a 1976 New Yorker article, Academy Award Winning writer/director Frank Pierson described the nightmare of working with Streisand and her boyfriend Jon Peters, whose improbable career arc took him from being Streisand’s hairdresser to producing the original Michael Keaton Batman movie for Warner Brothers, to running Columbia Pictures:

“What about the cameraman? Who is he? What has he done?” [Streisand] asks.

“Bob Surtees? He won three Oscars, thirteen nominations.” I say.

“He’s old. We should have someone young on this picture. What does he know about backlight? Did he sign his contract’?” asks Barbra. Yes, I say. She lets it go.

* * * * * * * *

A movie set, as Orson Welles was the first to say, is the most wonderful electric train a boy was ever given to play with. What he failed to add was that most of the time it doesn’t work. You tinker, wheedle, stick in bent pins, tape it up with Band-Aids and spit, and it runs in fits and starts when it damn well pleases. Actors can’t, won’t, never will be able to say crucial lines; lights fail, time runs out, cameras break, tempers flare. I approach it with detachment, watching carefully the direction in which the flow of errors and accidents, improvisations and corrections is taking us. Barbra resents it terribly: It is a limitation of power, beyond the reach of her desperate need for control.

There is a moment for writers when their characters seem to assume a life of their own, beyond the will of the writer: we have reached the equivalent moment for a director, when the actors become one with their roles. It is a moment, in Bertolucci’s words, to “throw away the script and set sail on a sea of improvisation.” I would not go so far, being a writer myself, and because this script is unusually carefully crafted. And because Barbra in many ways is more loyal to the script and the words than I. She feels I am too permissive, “too nice” to actors. “You have to be hard on them,” she says. “They’ll walk all over you!”

* * * * * * * *

In dailies, Barbra’s mood swoops and plunges with every nuance of light on her cheekbone or unexpected camera move. “There! My God, look at her she’s beautiful!” we shout. Or a bit of staging she doesn’t like plunges her into a despair and rage that is vomited back in a savage attack: “This is shit! God what are we going to do! I told you not to do that, why did you do it? It’s wrong!” Everything is seen in terms of right or wrong: there is no personal preference, nuance or shading. The crew and staff drop out of screenings as the critical battles escalate, and even Surtees no longer comes.

* * * * * * *

Kris, uptight about press, worried over his music, is tense, angry over her interference. His new record has just come out and been panned by Rolling Stone and most everyone else. He’s drinking tequila washed down with cold beer.

Barbra rehearses with the band on her numbers and uses up Kris’s time, so he has no rehearsal. Coldly furious, he refuses to come out of his trailer. “Goddamnit!” he says. “I’ve got to go out and play it in front of 60.000 people, but she doesn’t give a damn.”

Barbra and I are trying to explain a minor change; we agree for once, but Kris has had all he can handle. He doesn’t want to be told what to do with his music. He explodes. Barbra explodes. The mikes are open: they are screaming at each other over a sound system that draws complaints from five miles away. The press is delighted. This is what they came for. Sulks in trailers. Jon Peters threatening Kris. Kris talking tougher. The director knocking on trailer doors, playing Kissinger. Notable quotes. Quotable notables. You read about it in Time.

“I’m a political writer and I don’t pretend to be more than a casual gamer,” Ashten Whited writes at Pocket Full of Liberty, which puts her one up on me. As I’ve said before, I largely retired from videogames when I unplugged my ColecoVision — there are only so many hours in the day. (Though I do have a product review up at the PJ Lifestyle blog this week that hints at the hobby that I also use my computer for.)

“However, I find GamerGate remarkable. I know people express antipathy to bringing politics into GamerGate, and I don’t seek to hijack it, but hear me out: GamerGate is already about politics,” Whited notes. Which is true — the left views everything through a political lens; after all, it’s been their stated opinion for decades that “the personal is political” (is personal, to complete the Mobius loop):

Mainstream videogames do not cater to feminists’ tastes. That does not mean that women are being “marginalized,” it means they are not the target consumer demographic, as they freely admit when they declare male-oriented games unappealing. Despite this, gamers placate feminists like Anita Sarkeesian who hold gaming culture in disdain and view escapism that is male in nature, such as Call of Duty or rescuing Princess Peach, as a problem that must be eliminated under their magnanimous direction. Feminists especially hold male sexuality in contempt, and are fussily ruffled by voluptuous, pixelated vixens that titillate the “male gaze.”

Radical (read: contemporary) feminists define the problem as men. Thus fantasies of male heroism are slated to be wiped from public consumption. Male chivalry is dead; women are the new white knights. Today’s third wave feminists (or “Third Wave Frustrationists,” as cleverly coined by Milo Yiannopoulos) kvetch the tired refrain, “Feminism is about equality!” It is a transparent Trojan Horse. These feminists are intolerant of masculinity, and their movement is about having power over men. They do not recognize healthy interdependence between the sexes, instead seeing a power struggle. They seek to feminize men and in doing so, masculinize themselves— and they are succeeding, through targeting boys.In public schools, boys are falling increasingly behind in performance, according to scholar Christina Hoff Sommers. In psychiatrists’ offices, young boys are overdiagnosed with ADHD and autism and are “medicated” for being “rambunctious” (i.e. behaviorally modified to fit the prevailing PC norm for how little boys should behave). This ideology is about subjugation, through wheedling, subtle manipulation and emotionally blackmailing rhetoric like “if you’re not a feminist, you’re a misogynist.”

In short, feminism in the West has assumed the features of an authoritarian movement.

However, according to Jasyn Jones, who blogs at the tastefully named Website “Daddy Warpig’s House of Geekery” (I love it), the “’Gamers’ are over” manifesto has had some very interesting pushback:

You can read a bit of it there on the image, and the rest of it here, but it said (in essence) “Gamers are dead, and good riddance!” After all, gamers are “obtuse shitslingers” whose “only main [sic] cultural signposts” are “Have money. Have women. Get a gun and then a bigger gun.” In short, abuse. And pretty vitriolic and one-sided abuse.

And that same day, in a coincidence so outrageous it staggers the imagination, this happened:

Click over to Jones’ post to see a fascinating example of what appears to be Journolist-style collusion behind the scenes to advance the “gamers are over” narrative, which dovetails into Milo Yiannopoulos’ series of posts at Breitbart London on the videogame journalism industry’s own Journolist scandal. Followed by the aforementioned Leigh Alexander personally insulting her readers on Twitter. As Jones writes, “This isn’t just insulting your customers wholesale, it’s insulting them retail. Personally. One by one. In alphabetical order, for all I know:”

The odd thing is, most gaming media figures have joined her. But there’s a problem, and it’s one I can’t solve: what’s their end game? What do they think they’re accomplishing by insulting the people who provide them with paychecks?

As I see it:

Attack customers -> they leave. No customers, no clicks. No clicks, no ads. No ads, no money. No money, no site.

Is it really all that complicated? You don’t punch your customers in the face repeatedly, and expect them to remain your customers. Doing so anyway is a recipe for bankruptcy. (And is sheer lunacy.)

See also: implosion of MSM organizations that go full-on into social justice warrior mode and insult their customers. By the time the Washington Post was sold to Jeff Bezos last year, as John Nolte noted at Big Journalism,it had lost 87 percent of its value from the prior decade. (Along similar lines, Mark Steyn compared Bezos $250 million acquisition fee last year of one of the most legendary newspapers in the world to the much less influential Worcester Telegram & Gazette in Massachusetts being sold in 1999 for $295 million.) Prior to Bezos’ acquisition, the Post famously unloaded Newsweek for a dollar after its foray into hard left politics caused it to shed most of its readership.

Similarly, the New York Times has been hemorrhaging money since the Howell Raines era; arguably, only Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim’s financial backing has allowed the Sulzberger family to maintain ownership, but only at the cost of cutting 7.5 percent of its staff (on top of other employee cuts in recent years). And as we noted last night, MSNBC is getting their clocks cleaned in the ratings department; “MSNBC: Best Demo Night In Two Weeks Is ‘Lockup’ Marathon,”Big Journalism reported on Monday.

Believe it or not, I watched this commercial while wearing a pair of Sennheiser earphones – the HD 280 Pro model which I’ve owned for years and use for recording, not the swinging Teutonic reprobate “Urbanite” pictured above.

For example, Foley’s alleged executioner, Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, was raised in England in a West London home worth nearly two million dollars. In this respect he fits the profile of many if not most of the al Qaeda terrorist leaders, who were brought up in milieus that were hardly primitive. From what we know about ISIS (and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups), a significant portion of their jihadis are quite familiar with the modern world but have purposely cast off their background and its refinements in a process referred to by Lee Harris in his 2004 book Civilization and Its Enemies as “de-civilization” as distinguished from barbarism:

…I propose the word de-civilization, defined as…: “the effort, conscious or unconscious, to become less civilized than you are, either in general or in some special way, and, so far as in you lies, to promote a similar change in others.”

In terms of fantasy ideology, the function of de-civilization is not merely to promote ideas opposed to civilization, but to make men and women into human beings with a totally different set of visceral and emotional responses to atrociousness.

…[W]hile savagery and de-civilization can both produce atrocities, they do so in entirely different ways.

De-civilization is therefore a deliberate process undertaken to serve the purpose of ISIS’s Islamic supremacist ideology. Those who engage in it have systematically and purposefully cast off any reservations about mayhem. They do so in part as a bow to what they see as their glorious, sterner history and laws, and for the purpose of engaging in exactly that behavior which they believe will be most frightening to the west.

But de-civilization needn’t always end in the mass-bloodshed of jihad, of course. Sometimes its impact appears in much more “subtle” forms:

I remember the first time I heard Green’s 2010 song “F*** You” (on Electra Records, until recently another fine quality division of Time-Warner-CNN-HBO) and thought, musically, this is the best Motown song I’ve heard in three decades. But lyrically, it’s a reminder of everything that went wrong with pop culture in the last three decades. It reminded me of something I wrote about in 2007 about — stick with me here — the George Clooney / Steven Soderbergh film The Good German:

The funny thing is, I would bet serious money that the average Hollywood mogul probably has TCM tuned into his rear-projection HDTV screen pretty often. But when he does, he’ll focus on the tiny details, and lose sight of the big picture. He’ll get hooked on Orson Welles’ deep-focus photography, and not his character studies. Or Hitchcock’s rhythmic editing, and not how deftly he handles a story.

From its poster to its cinematography, what was Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German if not an attempt to mate the brilliant craftsmanship of old Hollywood with the dark cynicism of its current form? As The Good German’strivia page on the IMDB states, “The film was shot as if it had been made in 1945…The only allowance was the inclusion of nudity, violence and cursing which would have been forbidden by the Production Code”. And yet it’s that Production Code that virtually created classic Hollywood, by giving it rules to operate under–and yes, push against. But pushing against isn’t quite the same as breaking; that would come much later, much to the box office’s chagrin.

Green’s recent admission — or as he attempted to backpedal from it yesterday, “the comments attributed to me on Twitter” — places “F*** You” into sharp perspective.

In his recent review of the James Brown biopic Get On Up, Steve Sailer wrote, “When rehearsing 1967’s repetitious ‘Cold Sweat,’ he tells his crack band to forget all they’ve learned about music: ‘Every instrument a drum.’” Sailer goes on to note, “In the long run, Brown’s narrowing the parameters of black American music has been a cultural disaster: every instrument is not really a drum…By 2014, ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams, which would have made a worthy Curtis Mayfield B-side, seems like a monumental accomplishment.”

Yes, it was quite a shock to hear a song on the radio in 2014 with an actual catchy, singable melody, and one whose chorus wasn’t built around the F-word.

Other than the self-hating misanthropy of “Big Yellow Taxi” (“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Yes, and over the last 150 years, “they” also put up electric lights, air conditioning, the polio vaccine, and err, the musical instruments, concert halls, record players, radio and TV networks, and the commercial aviation that made your career possible), I’ve enjoyed a number of Joni Mitchell’s songs, and her adventurous musical spirit. But this article in today’s London Daily Mail paints a picture of a very tormented 70-year old soul:

Reflecting on her childhood, Mitchell reveals she was terribly affected by Bambi, particularly the scene where the deer’s mother was trapped in the fire. It was an unlikely spark for her artistry. The traumatic scene made her obsessively draw pictures of fire and deer running, in an attempt to exorcise it from her mind.

‘I think maybe that’s the beginning of my contempt for my species and what it does. How ignorant it is of sharing this planet with other creatures. Its lack of native intelligence, common sense, or spirituality addressed to the earth…’, she told the author.

* * * * * * * *

While living luxuriously between two homes, she’s adamantly negative on America and the industry that made her so successful.

‘America is like really into Velveeta (the processed cheese). Everything has to be homogenized. Their music should be homogenized, their beer is watered down, their beauties are all the same. The music is the same track’.

But it’s in America that her music is playing in department stores and in elevators. Joni Mitchell has become the soundtrack to millions of lives, and the royalties from those songs have made her very wealthy.

* * * * * * * *

But it’s not a recurrence of polio.

‘Morgellons is constantly morphing. There are times when it’s directly attacking the nervous system, as if you’re being bitten by fleas and lice. It’s all in the tissue and it’s not a hallucination. It was eating me alive, sucking the juices out. I’ve been sick all my life’.

Mitchell broke off friendships feeling she was wasting her time with some people she calls ‘deadwood’.

She lost her drive and doesn’t follow projects through to conclusion. She’s forgetful and can’t remember what she just said, Marom writes.

If she’s out walking and has a thought she wants to remember but no notebook, she won’t remember when she gets home.

‘There’s a lot of lethargy with my illness. I’m fatigued’, she laments. And the medicines she was taking gave her brain fog, adding: ‘My creative energy went into survival and into furnishing the interior of the house [in British Columbia]‘.

If you hate mankind so much that you admit “contempt for my species and what it does,” then you must on some level hate yourself, your own existence, as well. Honest question: how much stress does that put on a body and impact a person’s health?

I’m not a doctor and I can’t say if “Morgellons syndrome” is a real thing or not, but people who are doctors seem pretty convinced that it’s not.

Enough people have frantically gone into their doctor’s office complaining of tiny fibre-parasites that if these parasites actually existed, we would know about it by now.

And what does this have to do with Joni Mitchell?

Well, people often say a leftist outlook makes people miserable. That may be true, but I think that the more important thing in this relationship is that tormented, miserable people frequently seek out a politics — a philosophy, a religion — that gives meaning to, and thereby redeems, their own pain.